Angel Trismegistus wrote: ↑September 21st, 2020, 4:00 am
Angel's point
beauty:flower::speed:light
Steve's straw point
beauty:flower::300,000 km/s::light
From the perspective of a logical argument, I would side with Steve on this one. The speed of light is going to be the same to any observer - the beauty of the flower will not. (If you believe that beauty is a property of the object and not dependent on the observer, I'd suggest you visit an art or music forum and see how often you can persuade anyone that a particular work of art or style of much is beautiful if they find it ugly - I predict your success rate at this will be very low.)
But that aside, I think there's more to this argument than first meets the eye, and Angel, I'm surprised you haven't turned to the work of your favorite philosopher on this point. In his lectures on Pragmatism, James said that:
truth is one species of good, and not, as is usually supposed, a category distinct from good, and co-ordinate with it. The true is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief, and good, too, for definite, assignable reasons.
In this sense, I think James makes a very important point that the truth of something, such as the correct measurement of the speed of light, is indeed a matter of value. We hold something to be true because it does have value in a particular sense. So if you follow me, I think you are approaching your case a little bit backwards by suggesting that value 'is real' - that Beauty, or God, are a subset of the collection of things that we identify as being 'real', or that we can can deduce or prove that they are real by any argument that proposes that they meet the requirements to be considered as such because they share some properties in common with those other objects. Rather, it is value itself, in its various forms, by which we make the determination itself that any and all things are real or beautiful in the first place. Value precedes these determinations - it does not follow from them.